


honest.

by Nyah



Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Boatsex, F/M, Game of Thrones season 7 finale
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-08-30
Updated: 2018-08-29
Packaged: 2018-12-21 18:57:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 1,365
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11950566
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nyah/pseuds/Nyah
Summary: Who is he to be here? Second born and last choice, bastard son and heir of nothing but the honesty that might yet be the death of them all.





	1. Chapter 1

He raises a fist to knock on the door that’s appeared before him as if by magic. The wood, plain and solid, hums with the force of the sea beneath it. His eyes catch on the hair sprouting darkly from his knuckles in rough profusion. That hair had stood on end when he woke from death feeling like he’d swallowed a jar of lightning.

Sound punctures his thoughts, an echo in reverse, the ancestor of the hollow rap his fist will make on the heavy, polished oak of the door. The noise is intrusive and absurd, like a grave robber’s footfalls on the cobbles of a mausoleum as yet unfilled with bones.

He hesitates. His heart hammers, hammers, stops. He feels the cold seep in.

His knuckles freeze and crack like ice falling from the Wall. Who is he to be here? Second born and last choice, bastard son and heir of nothing but the honesty that might yet be the death of them all? Jon Snow, ill-begotten, ill-fated, ill-met. Too stupid to stay dead at the advice of a dozen knives, too prideful to lie to save thousands of men.

You know nothing. You know nothing.

He is here because he fights for life. He’s met her because he knows what it is to be dead.

His heart stutters back to life. Blood pounds in the arteries of his neck, prickling the skin of his face with life.

Lightning leaps between his fingers.

He knocks.

The sound is softer, warmer than he could have anticipated, hardly louder than the groan of the ship. He feels like a dead man in a mummer’s farce of the living. When the curtain opens, what’s his part. Not Commander now, not King, never Stark. He doesn’t know what is meant to happen next.

The door opens on the Queen and he remembers himself in an indrawn breath.

“You know nothing, Jon Snow,” he hears in the exhale, in the moment before the one in which he meets her eyes.

But then, “I was expecting you, ” she says. “Come in.”


	2. honest.

honest.

 

That he'd anticipated the heat of her bedroom was a mercy. That he'd anticipated the shock-- as the chill of the hallway was banished for a mild summer's dawn just across her threshold--was enough of a triumph to let him meet her eyes. 

 

They were as purple as sweet midsummer stone fruits, purple as priceless silk, purple as his boyhood dreams of Old Nan's most sumptuous tales. But though he found his feet taking one step further than he'd meant with each perfumed thought, this too--the vividness of her--he was ready for. He'd lived inside tales for years now, had battled the Night King and won the Wall and outlived death. He'd done none of those things to prepare himself for the Mother of Dragons but prepare him, they had. By the time his ship landed on Dragonstone, he was tempered enough to face the Queen. The woman, now, had him entirely undone.

 

He met her eyes and the hitch in his breath was so small it would have been beneath his own noticed if the every sound hadn't crescendoed to meet the rising heat and the deep purple of her eyes.

 

"Your Grace," he said and his voice sounded too low and steady for the boy he'd become when the door swung inward.

 

"Lord Snow," she replied, with a look that seemed akin to the smooth features and formal tones that meant danger.

 

And yet.... "Do you know when I was first called that, 'Lord Snow?'"

 

"I don't." She said, mouth flickering as the spark of a smile landed. The boy in him worried briefly that she was laughing that he should presume she wanted to know anything about him at all. The man knew if she was laughing it was because neither of them expected to talk of anything so normal anymore than they'd expected to notice together when the heat between them passed from summer's day to crackling hearth.

 

And yet.

 

There was furniture in her room, he assumed, though he couldn't make out anything but vague, heavy shapes outside the tunnel of his vision. At his back there was a fire, he assumed, for the shadows danced across her cheeks in counterpoint to the broad them narrow rhythm of the sea. 

 

"It was when I first came to the Night's Watch." He told her the story of how he'd gone to the Wall because he had no place and no name of his own and then beaten them all in all the wrong ways because he'd spent his life being taught not to lead. He told her that first tale from start to finish, his first war story.

 

They stood swaying with the ship, a pace apart. Here, the heat coming off her was like coals of brightest red. He knew he wasn't the only one to feel it, knew they all did their best to ignore this further evidence of power and magic beyond the grasp of mortal men. But he didn't know how they did it, how they stood beside her to offer counsel or pay tribute when it was all he could do not to scream as his blood boiled and her hand reached out like a tongue of flame.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Had fairly well abandoned this until some gracious readers reminded me it was unfinished, so here we go. Perhaps complete, perhaps not. But more complete, anyway.

3.

On the day their first son is born in a tide of blood and fire, Jon Snow will feel the child’s indrawn breath like a molten blade feels its final shape in cool water; he’ll know the first forge and fold of steel happen now, when she lays her head against his chest like a prayer. On that day, not so far off now as it was, when their impossible heir draws breath to wail, his heart will run with the sap of youth and he will remember the oldest truth he’s ever known: the shape of stories.

It tugs at him now, the pattern Old Nan taught him so long ago. Story is his milk tongue, after all, and legend his earliest law.

She reaches for him with a slowness that belies the certainty. He sees lightning on her palms. He knows everything for the briefest moment, knows he’ll remember the awe and terror of her first touch, knows he’ll remember the way her skin whispers words below hearing, knows he’ll hear them and understand in the fullness of time.  
Then he knows nothing but the shape of firelight on her face when it’s tipped back bare inches from his.

The Queen holds his gaze, fingertips hovering over wool and leather. They are nearly of a height, most days, but now she is barefoot. And he nearly laughs, realizing he’d never before thought of her as someone who could go without royal costume, let alone shoes.

It’s not truly funny. It’s nerves and the sheer thrill of her regard. But there’s a matching smile crackling at the corners of her mouth that is the sister of lightning and he can’t look away even if it means being struck down. 

She kisses him with a sigh that speaks of the release of some long-feared thing, like he’s a white raven and she’s tired of worrying when winter will come. Fear and longing and a sudden, certain sense of the future.

Her lips are soft and tense. Love is has not often been love for her, he guesses. She’s a queen, her kiss is a political act she might be wasting on a bastard and turncloak. 

When she pauses and takes half a step back, he nearly apologizes, thinks of warning her that he’s not a king at all but half Wilding and half dead man. But in the lilting half-light he sees her as the stories say she has been: unblemished but every hair burnt from her body as night fills with dragon song. 

“Jon,” she says like an ice shelf plunging to earth, like something that can never be taken back. Her fingers weave into his hair and a pattern closes around him. “Jon.” It sounds like a word she’s been waiting to speak and a promise he’s willing to make and a hero's welcome home.


End file.
